Childhood Biography

As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning.

During World War II, the Japanese invaded a Dutch colony located in South East Asia called the Dutch East Indies (today known as the Republic of Indonesia).This story follows the trials and tribulations of a Dutch family while living on the idyllic island of Java. This pertinent story of innocent lives caught up in world politics illustrates how a happy and carefree childhood changed overnight into a seemingly never-ending nightmare.

In Snippets of Truths, author Mary Hardy shares the stories of her youth while growing up in rural Southern Mississippi in the '50s and '60s. A collection of anecdotes and vignettes, this memoir narrates the memorable experiences of Hardy's childhood. From the large to the small, and from the ordinary and everyday to the remarkable, Snippets of Truths recalls a wide array of events living on a farm, working in the fields, attending school, participating as a majorette, becoming homecoming queen, making homemade ice cream, and creating dolls out of Coca Cola bottles.

Utilizing her extensive knowledge and love of American history and the research skills she honed while acquiring a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Lynne Cheney set out to explore her own and her husband's family trees. After years of research, she uncovered two family histories that spanned almost three centuries and shared common themes of optimism, perseverance, and undaunted courage. Both families moved westwards in a growing nation, seeking lives of greater opportunity.

Poland suffered terribly under the Nazis. By the end of the war, six million had been killed. On 1 August 1944 Andrew Borowiec, a 15-year-old volunteer in the Resistance, lobbed a grenade from a Warsaw apartment block onto some German soldiers below – he felt he had come of age. Over that summer Andrew faced danger at every moment. Wounded the day after his 16th birthday, he was captured as he lay in a makeshift cellar hospital. Here he learned a lesson: there were decent Germans as well as bad.

Matchbox Mountain is a collection of stories told by the author about one year in her life in 1952 when she was 10 years old. Living in the mountains of western North Carolina in a house with no electricity, no running water, and no close neighbors, the author shares stories of how she and her siblings made their own world with little but creativity.

A. J. Albany's recollection of life with her father, the great jazz pianist Joe Albany, is the story of one girl's unsentimental education. Joe played with the likes of Charles Mingus, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, but between gigs he slipped into drug-induced obscurity. It was during these times that his daughter knew him best. After her mother disappeared, six-year-old Amy Jo and her charming, troubled father set up housekeeping in a seamy Hollywood hotel.

The year is 1939. As war breaks out across Europe, nine-year-old Susie and her older sister Gyll are dispatched to Africa by their mother. Alone on the dusty continent, the sisters find little sympathy in their new guardians, and little to like about their new way of life: patched-up clothes, a 6 o'clock bedtime (a particular indignity), and regular obsessive cleanliness rituals. Their continued presence a nuisance, and overwhelmed by fear of doing the wrong thing, Susie and Gyll seek an ally in Mavis.

As a comedian and conservative thinker, whip-smart funny Tom Shillue grounds his ideas about our current culture and political climate in stories from his childhood. Growing up as one of five kids in a devout Irish Catholic family in a small town outside of Boston, Tom sincerely believes that the rough-and-tumble, rules-dominated world in which he came of age was a better America - a time and place that made him into the well-adjusted, happy, successful man he is today.

The actress Isla Blair’s extraordinary, moving and uplifting story of her childhood in India and her separation from her parents. Born in Bangalore India, during the fading days of the Raj, Isla grew up on a tea plantation managed by her father. She spent her early years in the lush, verdant hills of Kerala with her much loved older sister Fiona, secure in the love and affection of her parents and her adored “Ayah”.

This is the true story of the youngest daughter of a Sydney couple living at Lockhart River Mission for 9 years, raising their children within an Aboriginal village of five tribes. Conceived on Cape York, and finally moving to Rockhampton as a young child. A family tragedy in 1971 with the shocking death of brother Chris, two days before a family wedding, sees the upheaval of family life. Patty feels abandoned and has to educate and raise herself as well as learn to iron a cassock! Share her adventures in this gentle, humorous and insightful early memoir.

In this insightful, emotional, and thought provoking memoir, fashion mogul Blake Martin bares his soul and guides his audience through his childhood trauma. Through entertaining stories and brutal honesty, Martin stands on the pedestal of his truth.

These are bittersweet and sometimes funny true Romany Gypsy stories from my childhood, from 1943 to 1959. These are true Romany Gypsy stories from my childhood as I remember them, with a little bit of the author’s artistic license to make them more enjoyable. If you are looking for stories that romanticize a Romany Gypsy life on the open road, then this audiobook is probably not for you. However, if you are interested in the true life of Romany Gypsy's, you may find this audiobook interesting.

Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up.

When he was ten years old Josh Sundquist had his leg amputated to treat bone cancer. But this is not a sad story; on the contrary, this memoir is a story of resilience, heart, and most importantly: humor. Young Josh had a lot of adapting to do after he lost his leg. He had to learn how to walk again. He had to accept that he wouldn't be able to try out for the travel soccer team. He knew his life would never be the same again. But when he sees a poster in the hospital elevator advertising skiing classes, he realized all might not be lost.

With little more than a run-down Jeep and their newborn baby in tow, author Micah Perks' parents set out in 1963 to build a school and a utopian community in the mountains. The school would become known as a place to send teens with drug addictions and emotional problems, children with whom Micah and her sister would grow up. This complex memoir mixes a moving celebration of the utopian spirit and its desire for community and freedom with a lacerating critique of the consequences of those desires - especially for the children involved.

Uri Shulevitz, one of FSG BYR’s most acclaimed picture-book creators, details the eight-year odyssey of how he and his Jewish family escaped the terrors of the Nazis by fleeing Warsaw for the Soviet Union in Chance. It was during those years, with threats at every turn, that the young Uri experienced his awakening as an artist, an experience that played a key role during this difficult time. By turns dreamlike and nightmarish, this account of determination, courage, family loyalty, and the luck of coincidence is a true publishing event.

True Fables: Stories from Childhood is just right for the young listener. Comforting and comfortable, these fables will be enjoyed by children and adults everywhere. They exude a living presence that most manufactured stories can't achieve. And a larger spiritual aura surrounds it all.

Nancy McCabe, who grew up in Kansas just a few hours from the Ingalls family’s home in Little House on the Prairie, always felt a deep connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. McCabe read Little House on the Prairie during her childhood and visited Wilder sites around the Midwest with her aunt when she was 13. But then, she didn’t read the series again until she decided to revisit in adulthood the books that had so influenced her childhood.

Teresa Newton-Terres never knew her dad. Losing him when she was only two, she lived with unresolved grief for almost 50 years. But when a dusty scrapbook hidden by her grandmother lands on her doorstep, she plunges into an abyss to uncover the story. In 1960, an eminent physicist and six other men including Newton-Terres' father left on a covert Raytheon-related underwater communications experiment.